1. Field of the Invention
Technology for monitoring software in a computing environment is provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
The growing presence of the Internet as well as other computer networks such as intranets and extranets has brought many new applications in e-commerce, education and other areas. Organizations increasingly rely on such applications to carry out their business or other objectives, and devote considerable resources to ensuring that they perform as expected. To this end, various application management techniques have been developed. One approach involves monitoring the infrastructure of the application by instrumenting the application and using the instrumentation to collect data regarding the individual software components that are invoked in the application. This approach can use agents that essentially live in the system being monitored. For example, using the instrumentation, a thread or process can be traced to identify each component that is invoked, as well as to obtain runtime data such as the execution time of each component.
The agent software is updated from time to time, such as to provide new features and fix bugs. However, the update process is made difficult due to custom settings in the agent software which are made by the network administrator. Preserving the custom settings while updating the agent software can require extensive, time consuming manual input.